US healthcare quality is poor because…
Consumers don’t care.
Yesterday we dove into the disconnect between patient satisfaction (my nurse was sooo nice and my room…wow!) and quality of care (how likely was I to die).
Today, we focus on how this affects our healthcare. Or, as the researchers put it;
In an era of management by satisfaction survey, how does hospital competition shape the kind of medical services offered to patients?
Leaving out the coefficients, standardized deviations, null estimates and other researchers’ esoterica, we find:
Local competition among hospitals leads to higher patient satisfaction, but lower medical quality.
Yep, because we consumers value quiet